Grimey Tech and Cellphone Cyphers

A recent piece at Wired News about grime rappers and cellphones emphasizes the creative uses and misuses of mobile communication. Sometimes described as a Casio sound, grime beats often have a toy music quality that fits cellphone technology rather well.

The Wired piece describes the phenomenon of grime cyphers conducted around speaker phones, some with mp3 capabilities:
"Instrumental music is downloaded from sites like Rewind and transferred to the phone via Bluetooth or infrared. Friends hang out outside, 'spitting in groups around the streets . . . They wave their arm in front of themselves, like they are telling off a small child,' [music producer Joelle] Reefer wrote in an e-mail, describing the dance style currently in fashion on the U.K. garage scene. 'Shaping and pointing their fingers to resemble guns, (they) start to spit/rap in synchronization one after the other, spitting a 16- or a 32-bar rhyme.'"

Cellphones are used in other ways as well. For example, MC Shystie's manager Justin Stennett says that she "uses her phone 'like a laptop.' She writes lyrics using text messaging, and often uses the voice recorder on the phone. When she's finished working in the studio, she takes tracks with her as MP3 files on her phone."

Of course, some of this cellphone usage is simply a creative outcome of the growing presence of mobile tech in every facet of daily life. Yet the current limits of mobile communication seem especially suited to the practitioners of grime. Grime mc Lady Sovereign describes her use of the Internet to share bits of her tracks in a way that suggests an affinity to cellphone music:
"I used to use little cheap computer microphones and record 30 seconds of me doing a few lyrics . . . I'd send them to random people that I didn't know and they'd send them on, and so on."

In many ways, grime's use of technology presents a scenario that a good cyberpunk author might have written a few years back presenting an example of the development of technoculture in the near future. I just wonder what's going to happen as grime producers get real budgets. I'm also looking forward to the chopped and screwed version of the grime compilation Run The Road which, by the way, convinced me that grime can go mainstream in the U.S., but that's a story for another post.